The skinny on fat and its link to stem cells

By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times

Published
4:12 pm EDT, Monday, September 14, 2009

That fat you've been carrying on your hips, thighs and belly can be transformed with relative ease into cells that eventually may be capable of repairing a wide range of your damaged or diseased tissues, according to a new report by Stanford University researchers.

Stem cells found in fat deposits, it turns out, are more primitive than are many adult stem cells harvested from tissues such as skin and blood. With comparatively less effort than is required to make, for instance, a stem cell derived from skin return to an undifferentiated cell form, fat cells can be reprogrammed to become muscle, neuron and stomach lining cells, finds a new study slated for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"They are more embryonic-like" than stem cells derived from skin, said Ning Sun, who conducted the research at Stanford University's Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine Institute. And reprogramming adipose stem cells to become "pluripotent" is more efficient as well, said Sun. Using skin-cell "fibroblasts," researchers had to manipulate about 1,000 cells to yield a single induced pluripotent stem cell; the same process conducted on 1,000 stem cells from fat yielded 20 induced pluripotent stem cells.

The science of reprogramming adult stem cells to behave more like those derived from human embryos remains in its infancy, and researchers point to many uncertainties, including the risk that the use of some reprogrammed stem cells in patients might jump-start the growth of cancers. But the search for ways to make adult stem cells perform the same feats of transformation that embryonic stem cells do has provided an alternative to those cells with fewer ethical drawbacks.